Hello Alex, all,
Thanks for sharing this post with the list. I read it yesterday and I thought it was a very interesting post. The questions Barrett asks at the end are relevant.
However, I hope you don't mind a sincere and personal reply inspired by the emotions and thoughts that reading this article provoked in me over the last few hours and which I haven't been able to express anywhere else. Below are just some disjointed ideas.
I find concepts such as "post-national" really troublesome. On a personal and political level the concept annoys me; it upsets me. What are the pre-required affordances for "post-nationalism"? What is really meant by this? (and with this question I don't mean "let's read closely the key authors who have used this terms to find out how to understand the term properly"). It seems to me that more than ever the concept and reality of Nation (the country where one was born and one has a identification document from) imposes very concrete conditions that in my opinion render the idea of post-nation as Utopianism.
As someone who has travelled (in a very limited scale) with a Mexican passport for some 20 years, I have never been in a situation in which I can say that the concept of "Nation" has been left behind. On arrival to other countries, my wife, colleagues, friends go through a queue which is different than mine. Often, they have to wait for me to be finally allowed in. Last year in Vancouver, I was the only passenger from the whole plane who had to go through two different border checks including an extended interrogation that was triggered by the words "Mexican academic".
In the digial sphere, I continuously witness the consolidation of localisms, parochialisms and a general lack of interest in what happens outside "the Developed World". Everyday I grow more and more disappointed at how the "World Wide Web" is not really international nor global nor, er, "postnational".